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Cisco CloudCenter [EOL] vs IBM Turbonomic comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco CloudCenter [EOL]
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Turbonomic
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (10th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (16th)
 

Featured Reviews

ZT
Director Of Technology at a non-profit with 11-50 employees
Useful features for configuring down to ports but extremely expensive
Our company uses the solution's GUI interface to configure and monitor ports. We look at usage and determine if there are any issues.  Cisco is a very qualified company and has been in business for many, many years.  The solution is useful because you can configure all the way down to ports.  You…
reviewer1446966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them
The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens. When I change the resolution to 1080, I only see half of what I would on my big 4K monitor. It would be annoying to have to scroll to see the flow chart. They have a flow chart that goes top to bottom like a tree. On a lower resolution, it might be nice if that scrolls horizontally because it's long, narrow, and tall. It's only three icons wide, but it's 15 icons tall. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to change that for a smaller screen and customize the widget.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The initial setup is fairly straightforward if you have a basic setup."
"Cisco has a lot of published information and documentation that helps users understand the product and its offering very well."
"However, for the rest of the solution, the product is doing a great job for what we require."
"You can scale it easily."
"Upgrades are very simple as well because they've allowed us to get updates directly in the CloudCenter Suite manager. If you need to do an upgrade to your setup afterward, you just push a button and it rolls out the parts and retires the old ones. It's seamless and very simple compared to what we've done before."
"There are workflows, automated workflows, of different tasks between different infrastructure divisions, like your VMware, your firewall, and your network."
"The solution has a blueprint pattern where you can club multiple machines, define middleware components, define dependencies of components, and create an application pattern for a Java stack that can be consumed across all services using the same TOSCA patterns for CloudCenter, vRealize Automation, and ServiceNow."
"The initial setup process is straightforward."
"Comparing Turbonomic Support against HPE, VMware, and Cisco, is like comparing heaven and hell."
"The automation in Turbonomic is priceless, and all the dashboards, native or custom build, give a complete virtual and physical hardware performance view."
"Our ROI occurred in less than 6 months by allowing us to avoid a costly server upgrade that was planned for parts of our VMware infrastructure."
"One of the most valuable features for us was the automation aspect."
"Allowing Turbonomic to take over for vCenter DRS has shown a marked decrease in vMotion of virtual machines to keep our cluster resources balanced."
"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."
"Technical support is where Turbonomic shines."
"I like Turbonomic's automation and AI machine learning features. It shows you what it can do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically. Integration with an APM system makes the AI/ML features truly effective. Understanding what the application is doing and the trends of application behavior can help you make real-world decisions and act on that information."
 

Cons

"We're moving away from it due to the fact that they discontinued the product and introduced something new that does not fit our purpose."
"They can add some of those features to make the platform more usable for different backgrounds and developer skills."
"The tool should improve its security on the XDR part."
"Improvements are needed in UI and multi-tenancy for this solution."
"The improvement I would like to see is not one thing particular to CloudCenter. I'd say it's more of a message that the system is still using a lot of the different products and if they would all just fit better together, they all could be faster together."
"For many clients, the main problem with the solution is the price. Cisco is very expensive. If they could somehow make the pricing more competitive, that would be a big draw."
"I'm not a big fan of CloudCenter. I don't have anything against it, however, the on-premise version has been so hard to upgrade and maintain."
"They should provide an entire cloud offering, from architecture to network security features."
"Alert emails could be more comprehensive."
"Every once in a while when we perform an upgrade, it wipes out our setting."
"The reporting module has very big potential, but really lacks predefined reports for all kinds of purposes."
"GUI is ugly."
"When we switch to version 8, we can't upgrade our appliance, because it's a new instance. What that means is we will lose all our historical data."
"I seem to find a new bug with each new version."
"I have had some issues from time to time with DB table errors, though not sure if it is a product issue or the storage I am on."
"We did see a few issues on a previous version with reporting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is balanced with the market."
"The solution is extremely expensive and has additional fees for things like monitoring."
"The tool's pricing is expensive."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Construction Company
14%
Media Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is set as a percentage of the consumption of some of our customers' services. The ...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting. This helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single d...
 

Also Known As

CliQr, CliQr CloudCenter
Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NTT, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), CollabNet, Pratt & Miller, PZFlex
IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Find out what your peers are saying about Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NetApp, IBM and others in Cloud Migration. Updated: June 2026.
902,417 professionals have used our research since 2012.